One Piece – Live Action Season 1 Review

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After failing with Death Note and creating the utter disaster that was the Cowboy Bebop live action series when I heard that Netflix was tackling One Piece I laughed at the idea given the One Piece world is weirder and wilder than either projects they previously got so wrong. So imagine my surprise when I started hearing that it was actually good, so positive was the reception that against all my instincts I gave it a go, and you know what? It is good! Not amazing, it has flaws not just related to having to condense so much story into so few episodes, but the fact I enjoyed a live action version of One Piece at all is some sort of minor miracle. So let’s take a deeper look at the show, a good few weeks after its relevant because I’m me and I do that sort of thing…

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Doctor Who: Once and Future – The Martian Invasion of Planetoid 50 Review

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This month’s Once and Future is the first to feature a future incarnation of The Doctor from what I still believe is the Eighth Doctor’s perspective as David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor makes an appearance (or is it the Fourteenth?! … Right, Big Finish don’t have the license…) While you can tell how this was written after the Once and Future strand had already been planned out, as admitted by the writing team themselves, it ends up being one of the better stories, once again having a very self-contained plot full of randomly thrown in characters but at least this time the story was good fun! So let’s take a look…

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Star Wars: The High Republic – Balance of the Force / Battle for the Force Review

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It’s time to finally put a cap on Phase II of the High Republic by looking at the comic run that unlike Phase I didn’t really have a clear breaking point (even though the trade paperback people tried, as you can see by the title!) Over 10 issues we see a mostly new group of Jedi on the planet Jedha, dealing with several issues to do with the many different Force-based groups before seeing the Battle of Jedha through their eyes. It’s a very fun story actually, not that I should really be surprised at this point… Let’s take a look!

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Dragon Ball – 23rd Tenkaichi Tournament Arc (Episodes 140 – 148) Review

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It’s time to wrap up the final story arc of the original Dragon Ball series… well, it would be if this was the manga (though that was technically just called “Dragon Ball” the whole way through) but ignoring the post story filler arc, this is the big finale as Goku and Piccolo do battle in one final epic Dragon Ball battle before the beam-fests and teleporty fights that follow in Z. How does it hold up? Why, let’s take a look, shall we?

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Doctor Who: In the Night – Resistor Review

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If I were to give a one sentence review for “Resistor” it would be that it’s a simple two-part story that’s just… fine. The main issue is coming right after “Pursuit of the Nightjar” which is an extremely tough job for any story, let alone one with such a comparatively short run time. Still, putting that aside and looking at it by itself, what’s it like? Let’s take a deeper look…

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Jujutsu Kaisen – Hidden Inventory / Premature Death Arc (Episodes 25 – 29) Review

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It’s time to squeeze in a quick modern anime review as the new season of Jujutsu Kaisen is nicely split into two arcs and as this one is only five episodes it’s already ended (in fact it ended a couple of weeks ago, actually…) then it made sense to do it now rather than wait for the official end of the season. That being said it’s despite its short length it’s certainly no less important for it, so let’s take a look!

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X-Men: The Animated Series – Season 2 Review

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The second season of the animated X-Men series has an over-arching plot across all 12 episodes though really it’s mainly short cut-away sequences that don’t go anywhere until we get to the two-part finale. It was an interesting choice but I don’t feel it worked well. Luckily though a lot of the actual episodes are really fun and feature some pretty deep cuts from Marvel lore mixed with interesting looks at our titular heroes… so let’s take a look!

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Dragon Ball – 23rd Tenkaichi Tournament Arc (Episodes 133 – 139) Review

David Hogan2 Comments

After what seems like forever it’s time to wrap up the original Dragon Ball series with the final arc (and that mini filler arc the anime team added afterwards…) What always strikes me about this arc is how it’s the exact opposite of the 22nd TB arc in that there is very nearly no filler whatsoever making it back-to-back fights with little breaks. The one-day tournament is back to actually being a one-day tournament! So let’s take a look at the preliminaries and the opening round, shall we?

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